Some suggestions for improving SP (and perhaps to a lesser degree MP)

[Taqwus]

1. Handicaps might be interesting.

Heck, the most obvious way to do this would be for the host / game setter-upper to specify how many design points each player gets (which would be made known to all players). Other modifiers might be interesting as well, but possibly harder (for instance, how does a global hp modifier interact with enslave/charming spells?).

Additional areas that shouldn't cause too much complexity later on would be starting gold, extra gems (e.g. X times initial gem income), extra troops (e.g. 1.5x starting).

In theory one could have a system in which design points get spent on advantages, but balancing would be enormously hard.


2. Algorithm problem, I think. Fortresses are mostly pretty expensive, and placement may be tricky (chokepoints? protecting certain magical sites? protecting researchers? high-resource areas? interesting indy troops?).

Starvation issues might be alleviated somewhat if it placed higher importance on nature magic / construction / supply items. A few Cauldrons of Broth or Summer Swords goes a long way.


3. Perhaps, hard to tell for me how much they're searching as I don't know the levels of the different magical sites. I wonder if it's using the divination spells.


4. I've seen 'em try, but not too often. They probably should more, although hm -- maybe it's considered futile if your gem income dwarfs theirs? Wouldn't know.

[Wauthan]

While your ideas are interesting Thinkthank I fear that they will be a lot easier to implement using mods and maps rather than changing the programming.

I've made some scenarious of my maps where I simply slap a fortress in various interesting places as well as putting in known sites. The independant forces must surely have a history in the province no? The AI makes good use of these things and creates a much more challanging game.

Try Gandalf Parkers "Poke in the Eye". There are fortresses in each and every province! You'll soon find yourself rasing castles just to keep them out of the hands of a rapidly growing enemy.

[tinkthank]

OK.
Taqwus, +/- gold and gems would be a neat idea too. Is all of this hard to do?
I think one could at least encourage the AI to build fortresses with a simple algorithm. Forget indy troops, bottlenecks, etc. for the time being and let the AI at least try to build 1 simply for the gold, the supply, and the chance to build more troops. I am sick of fighting starving AI troops!
But it seems this is hard to do. Thanks for informing me Wauthan about the difficulty in programming, I didnt know that. That is too bad, since I sort of like the maps and the unmodded games, but I will give it a whirl....